Hello folks!
There is a review of Friday's concert in New York at
Newsday.com, and the reviewer is very complimentary about Hayley.
MUSIC REVIEW
Going over the top from fab to prefabBY STEVE DOLLARSPECIAL TO NEWSDAY
February 13, 2006
One of the latest brainstorms of "American Idol" auteur Simon Cowell, Il Divo offers a new variation on the prefabricated pop group. The hunktastic foursome is like the Three Tenors crossbred with the Backstreet Boys.
Each member is a young, broadly dynamic vocalist with a specific attribute. Tenor David Miller is the tall all-American one. Baritone Carlos Marin is the seductive Spanish one. Tenor Urs Buhler is the, uh, guy from Switzerland. And Sebastien Izambard is the baby-faced French pop star - the sole Divo who is not classically trained and who has hair grazing the collar of his Armani suit.
None of these details really mattered too much when the group made its New York debut at Radio City Music Hall on Friday night.
Touring behind its latest album "Ancora" (Sony), Il Divo works an airless shtick in which every stage move is plotted down to the last centimeter, every flourish attenuated, every element of actual personality airbrushed into show-biz blandness.
The idea is fun, at least. Much of Il Divo's repertoire takes what used to be called MOR (middle of the road) pop fare - hits like Eric Carmen's "All By Myself" and the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" - and rearranges it for mini-symphonic spectacle.
With a 24-piece orchestra and a small band, the music can swoop with string-driven drama or thump with a firm backbeat.
Each vocalist gets a turn or two, delivering lyrics in English, Italian, Spanish or French, and winds up to a brief, faux aria. It's not like anyone's perverting opera for the sake of a few million CD sales. Instead, the songs already are inherently operatic, if not in the same sense as genuinely operatic-style pop musicians like Bruce Springsteen, and certainly not in the style of rock operas like The Who's "Tommy."
The set design is grandiose. Spotlights crisscross each singer as he descends to the stage, posing before fake Roman columns that evoke the Caesar's Palace casino more readily than classical antiquity.
Frequent costume changes succeed as excellent product placement for Armani, and cause the suave designer Rat Pack associations to mutate to the Off-the-Rack Pack.
These low-carb Pavarottis put more gust than gusto into their game, and seem to channel every emotion through a one-dimensional abuse of the vibrato. Rarely is there a sense of anything that happens naturally.
Even the awkward comic timing of a few skits, meant to introduce each member and warm up the sold-out, mostly age-40-and-up house, appears rigged.
Despite all that, Il Divo fulfills a popular craving for clean-cut entertainment and does it so smoothly that, like some of today's margarines, you can't believe it's not butter.
Marin, whose lower register and Latin-lover maneuvers set him apart from his cohorts, tends to an overwrought oiliness. But, hey, at least he's memorable.
Given the premise of Il Divo, it's hard to know what its members would be like holding court in some Italian cafe. Onstage, it's only a scenario they get to joke about.
Opening act Hayley Westenra comes off more fully authentic. Her taste for Irish ballads and 1960s folk-pop can't be faulted (even if the choices are obvious), but neither can her spotless voice. No matter what she sings, the primary feeling expressed is one of breeze-kissed optimism. She'd be murder on the blues. Perhaps, the living really is easier in her native New Zealand.-------------------------------------
Seeing the reviewer's name, he should be right on the money! $$$
i.postimg.cc/9fYxy370/smilie-big-grin.gifRichard
